How many timeshave humans moistened their quillswith the butt of a dewy tongueto curve their warm dark inkacross the blank stareof an open page, conjuring gracefulsweeping calligraphy, recordingtheir wounded knowledgein the hope it will preservedignity in others?The dignity they swapped for theirknowledge.How many tasty mottos have we branded on gravestones,hoisted up on bloody flags?Truth will out. Peace for all men.How many times have we defended our worldby cutting her roots, stem by stem,step by moon-boot step?So, this is another parable, of sorts.Written on rain-forest paper,jotted with octopus-juice.A parable about the nobility of whales,the aloof shuffling of the clouds,the shaking, drunken headof the wet daffodil.A parable about money and sex and powerand other ghosts.

The spirit was here, in the beginning,when the mountains were still growingand you could smell pollen on the sea,before the bees learnt to sting, beforethe kangaroos had that nasty land-mine accidentthat makes them jump involuntarily, beforethe sharks got their teeth sharpenedand the rain got so depressed. The spirit was herewhen the streets were lined with cradlesand the kings were chewing quietly on rusks,thinking of cuddles. The spirit was herewhen the pride of the rolling hillsflavoured the water, and the matronly windslapped your ankles with controlled affection.The spirit was herewhen God was still commonly knownas the moisture in the koala-bears eye,or the petal on the tide, before he got blownout of all proportion and the world beganto rot in hard-line mythology:Money is power. People are dispensable. Love hurts.I washed my burden in the oceanand the water ran black with ink.What follows are the words, the smudgy grubby words, I read on the dazzling sand...

We begin with an historical aside.

An Elizabethan sailor shuttered his eyeswith his hand, had a fleeting thoughtabout some kind of tinted glass eye wearthat might make sunshine easier,then OOPS he spied land.

“Lower the sails, lads, it’s the cutest island,shaped like codpiece, and bright blue! It’s bright blue!And deserted? Perhaps the people are away, swimming.I wonder if they’re also bright blue? Or pea-green?Chaps, this’ll cover the travel expenses, didn’t I saythe world was full of mystery?”

They nudged the tip of their shipinto the fleshy shore, the seaseemed to grunt, struggle, but theythrusted on, plunging their metal anchor.“We’re in!” They said, “let’s disembarkand fry some salted meat!”But then, the great unknownreared her startled head.

The island began to sink, right there,beneath their boots,it began to shake and splutter.For a second the captain thoughtthe islanders must live underground -in coal-mines perhaps,buried industrial factorieswith shuddering blue machinery.But he was wrong.He fainted into the arms of the first mate,screaming ‘God save us!’Their boat suddenly looked like a toy.Their puny feetclad in leather and whatnot,their badges of honour, just childrendressing up, their quivering little moustaches.And the big, blue whale,she was a mother, a daughter of the deep,she knew the power of oxygen,the almighty gulp of the never-ending cool.Humans were a scratchy dream,ants wriggling across her shoulder,she was so much olderthan thissilly, finders-keepers game.She shrugged them off, and calmlysank away.The men in britches panicked in the water,screaming “The island is a monster!”They didn’t know about whales, otherliving breathing creatures.They just saw islands, and dry land, and placesto rest their tired satchels.But now, they were freckles in the ocean,their altar-boy voiceslost in the direction-less sky.

I was young then, a whisperin the slow-blinking tropics,and I laughed at the little mentrying to mount a whale,I thought - humanity must bethe least seductive creature,just look at their pale, pale skinand their copied minds. Butthen they aimed their pale thoughtsat my island, and everything wentdark, dark red.

There are good spirits,and there are bad spirits.There are spirits who laugh and cryin the front-row, prayingfor a miracle.I could have warned them.I couldn’t have warned them.I am the spirit of the licked embankment,the spirit of the lapping rocks,this is the story of my island,and her descentinto the sea.

On the slippery back of a storm, a whale-hunteraccidentally found my island.His boat punched a blow-hole in the beach.He was windswept and crispy, with a mindlike a boy just out of college, readyfor the golden road, ready to be enlightened.He christened her ‘The Pleasant Island.’And he smiled all around, like a lighthouse,in Birmingham, Bombay and Brussels,you felt his smile.

Like a friendly grandfatherteaching his grandson to whittle a flute,the Whaler felt warmly obliged to take them over his knee.He invited his western friends,all the lads: Scissor-legs Charlie,Bruiser Bill, Drill-tooth James...brought in more whaling ships, some traders,opened a sandy crate of aleand stood, proud like a statue,one boot on another man's back,laughing at the horizon.

My islanders pinched themselves, love-struck,ran around, fetching coconut cupsfor everyone, pouring drinks.Some of the elders were resistant, prejudiced,cut massive hollows into tree-trunksand hid there, crying.But the boys fetched their spearsand skipped like giggling schoolgirlsto the camp fire,shouting “look what I made!”and “can I hold your gun?”Bruiser Bill built a mini assault course,with swinging ropesand wooden men, for target practice.Drill-tooth James got chummywith a local girl, gently tilted her faceto his beaker of rum.My islanders didn’t even thinkabout fishing, babies got left, forgotten,in quaking canoes... a few shotswere mistakenly firedinto citizen skin; one islander,who cheated at dice, was slightly knee-capped,then war broke out. It was kinda funat first, dramatic, Scissor-legs Charlieheld a dying boy in his armslike a hero and lied “sonny,you’ll live to kill another land-crab!”But after nine years, Bruiser Bill suggestedgetting the hell out.My islanders were wild-eyed, swappingtheir juvenile ibija fish for fire-arms and boozelike the world was on a timer,attacking passing piratesfor their gold teeth.

When the guns were sleepingto the sad clarinetof the endemic reed warbler,the western lads legged it.Scissor-legs Charliesnagged his foot in a man-trap,now they call him Bendy-peg Chip.They whispered up the sails, shushingeach other, like cub-scoutshaving a secret skinny-dip…they rippled farewell with their backwash.In the moonshine,she looked like a spirit island, hovering an auraover the treacle-black goo...

I opened my mouth to speak to them,but they only heard the trembleof their own lips, faltering spirits.

Eventually, the war dislodged itselffrom my islandlike an extra, rusty chromosome.The elders fell, dead, from the trees,their cold noses pronged into the groundlike frozen hens, forever pecking.A bad fairy had come in the nightwith a throneand a make-shift parliamentand a primitive canteen; a man patrollingthe beach, writing orders on a massive scroll:Fish soup, fish pie, risotto a la fish.Hans, the German Captain,had breakfast with my island’s new king...a stern man with shaking, hidden, appendages.Hans said: “Are you familiar with the word annexer?It’s a middle English word via Old French,taken from the Latin annectrewhich means ‘to bind.”

The King ordered more fish-cakes.Hans continued: “Germany wants to bind itself to you,become your back-garden, your extra library,your sexy Siamese twin. We’d like to offer youan annex. What do you say?”The King had his mouth full, thena cloud popped with blood, a flood flashed,an explosion of feathers yelled ‘trickery,’or ‘victory,’ and somewhere in the hustle,some papers got signed,perhaps by the wind.

My island became a marshal island, a cogin the speeding clock, consensual,cross-continent, sexual relations…Then the missionaries arrivedin their tweedy collars, singing“Who needs the Jungle Bookwhen you have the Bible?”So they scribbled out ‘losses,’scribbled in ‘Gods will.’While in conference rooms,under dusty lapels, empty heartswere screaming for innards. So,a buff Australian, Brad, surfed overto say: “G’day... World War...ain’t that a kick in the head?”Then the Germans swappedwith the Australians, high-fiving by the door,and my island made spacein her tiny bed, slept with her nosebanging softly on the wall.

In the process of rolling over, a stitchsnapped in her hipand my island, like a sweet,or a blood-ball, gushed her soft centreall over the shoesof the League of Nations,who promptly took their shoes to the labfor chemical testing and JACKPOT!My island was crammedwith fertilizing, match-making goodness,a big phosphate doughnutoozing cash…

So the League of Nationsstuffed a sock down his pants,after-shaved his Adam’s appleand hung out at the Pleasant IslandBingo Hall, crooning:“Come on baby,the bombs are flying in hurricane city,there are corpses in trenches and smogon your tongue, put a little justiceback in your universe, shake it,exploit your reserves.”

If an abstract beingcan become more invisible,I began to fade, my thoughtssketched lighter on the breezelike discarded advice, I wonderedhow a spirit could feelso disembodied.

The world was joining the circus,white-blond action-men with awkward salutesexpanding their stiltsto totter across Atlases,shouting about freaks. The secondin the trilogy, World War Two.When God cast a vote of no-confidence,and Mr Banzai appeared on the beach,with a large remote-control plane,a life-size game of Risk.The sky was no longera swimming-pool for birds.My islanders were a different race,eyes like car-doors locking, the dead smilethat holds the calm, calm faceafter the rough, rough beating.

Though the earth is not a parkyou’d unleash your puppy in,all humans dream of bare-foot danglingon midnight piers in small townswith zero crime and late bars,just you and your sneaky cigarette.Self-rule. In the sixties, illusionscame in red-taped documents,milk and honey was rice and beans.The island brandished her lipstick,scrawled ‘fuck you’ on the mirror,burnt that itchy western braand governed solo, swinging free.

Do you remember, sweet rock,when love was building bridges?When you and me meant ‘us’and the tower of Babelwas just the right height?Back over the sober cloudswhen rainbows sucked backwardsto the yawning sun,when my spirit-breathwas the benevolent airand you were my island, singing:‘Don’t you know that it’s worthevery pleasure on earthto be young at heart?’But the conveyor belts were whirringin the red-lights of the coral reef,bringing explosive beach-balls,Polynesian rats. Your trudging fatejust dying to teach youabout yourself.

First, diamond tankers brought hamburgers,grit in your eyes was pure cocaine,weighing scales told your weight in gold.But never kiss a hungry manright on the mouth.My islanders ate and ate away,chucking soil over their shoulders so fastthe sky got buried.Eventually, their spades hit bone.The phosphate ran out.Those who once scraped caviar from their fingernailsnow clawed at the smooth glassof that silent fortress: foreign aid.

Australia leant over, cigar in hand,and gently tapped his ash.My island became a dumping groundfor immigrants with frayed rope-ladderswho fell on the wrong side of luckand couldn’t scale that wall, not again.Paradise became a detention centre.Souls forbidden to return.

Now, two hundred years later,they crawl back to their cobwebbed canoes…but the fish have evolved,carry rape-alarms, travel in gangs,it’s like fishing for dreams.My islanders have magnets under their skin,scrap-metal flies from all four corners.But the drooping eyelidof the half-moon still drags the sea,the endless endgame, erosion and ruin.They live on the outskirts of themselves,wincing fingertips on wastelands,violated and to blame.

And I am weak with tears.No longer a Sea Goddess,just a goddesscursed to see.

Far below this Lego land; plasticradios squeaking tinny joy, fat mendriving thin cars, cloth flowersin the jaws of glum vases on high-risebalconies, lying to gravity,Far below, on the sea-bed,the whales are preparing…Laying down clean sheets, baking quiches,placing coasters on conches,for when the ice-cap spikes the bubbleand my people gurgle down to join them…

About the project

The Nauru Project is an artists' collaboration based around the South Pacific island of Nauru, the world's smallest island-nation. The project involves exchanging and gathering online findings on Nauru, obscure islands, experimental micro-nations, island-related art projects, and the production of artwork among a group of artists and online Nauru enthusiasts. It is run by Maria Georgoula.